[altairprime]

Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though? I’m an extremely rare outlier afaik :)

The administration has so far opened with one “Canvas said” and then an hour later one “Canvas is down indefinitely” email noting that they’re aware it’s serious.

(Canvas is a glorified wiki for teaching students, with quizzes and such, for those unaware.)

[dang]

> Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though?

That's my biggest fear.

[byronsharman]

I'm an undergrad student in computer science and I come here regularly. Many of my friends do the same. Of course, that can't be extrapolated to students globally, but students who love what they do are not extinct!

[dang]

You guys are making me feel better.

Same question for you as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065589, btw: what do your friends read besides HN?

[byronsharman]

HN is kind of the go-to platform. We also have a Discord server where we hang out and talk about stuff that may or may not be software-related. I know some of us are interested in getting accounts on lobste.rs, but we need to find someone to refer us. I keep forgetting to ask one of my professors.

[gucci-on-fleek]

FWIW, I'm a student, so there are at least a few still here. Feel free to ask me any questions (either via email or via replies to this post) and I'll try to answer them.

[dang]

Ok! How many of your smart friends read HN? and of the ones who don't, what do they read instead?

[gucci-on-fleek]

> How many of your smart friends read HN?

I don't think that any of them do, but I'm a Canadian math/physics major, which is slightly outside the target audience for HN.

> of the ones who don't, what do they read instead?

For the social aspect: mostly medium-sized Discord servers. For the news aspect: nothing at all. Both of these do have some advantages, but it's still a bit of a shame, because the Discord servers aren't indexed by Google, so they're hard for outsiders to find, and not reading the news means that they're missing out on some of the cool new tech advances.

[strix_varius]

Is there any internal data on where students are going instead?

[dang]

Not much, but I do ask the youngest founders what their friends read if they don't read HN, and the only consistent answer I hear is Twitter.

(and btw, they do say "twitter")

[AuthAuth]

Many of my sisters friends do everything entirely via tiktok. They look at what trends are popular and they target that fully on platform. This is for stuff like building niche targeted apps, selling beauty products/clothing brands, restaurants.

[DaSHacka]

You honestly don't wanna know

If my peers are any indication, a whole lot of TikTok, Reels, Twitter, Discord, and other such mind-numbing platforms.

The types of platforms I would consider 'substantive' (or, at least, more substantive than those platforms) are definitely on the way out.

The few times friends have seen me browsing Hacker News or a certain Mongolian basket weaving form, the first thing they comment on is how confusing the interface is, and how old the site looks.

I truly don't understand the mentality, but if your site doesn't take three seconds to buffer a simple text drop down menu, and have JavaScript elements load in mid-scroll that bump elements around the page making you just barely miss that button you were trying to click, then your site is seen as 'inferior' or 'sketchy'.

Perhaps I've just had a bad sample, but I've experienced a variety of different environments by this point, and by and large, I've seen more people in my generation act in that manner than not.

[dang]

This is actually reassuring. We don't need all your peers! We just need you and whatever smart cohort you're bonded with.

It's true that HN looks old - it looked old before you were born, probably - but (a) I have no idea how to change it, and (b) HN is a long bet on plain text. If the smartest young people lose interest in reading, I'm ok with HN dying for that reason. I just don't want it to die for any cheaper reason.

[gsquaredxc]

I would like to offer some additional reassurance: I send my friends articles I see on HN that might interest them. A (in my view) very good litmus test is when someone asks where I saw it, because this demonstrates some desire for continual learning. I find that anyone that asks that question seemingly trusts an interface like HN more because of it. My suspicion is that this is probably because at a certain point you see stuff like Agner Fog's work, LWN, or a number of other minimalist websites and realize that a website that is popular despite the lack of overindulgence in UI must be popular because of the content. It doesn't hurt that the best courses in my university experience have had websites that have not changed much since the late 1990s (one did change the lime green text on turquoise background on their page after the recession to a color scheme that didn't cause headaches in students).

I do find that my peers that now read HN used to be judicial about curating a Reddit feed and mostly otherwise limited on other sources. Short-form content is addictive and as nearly as unavoidable as sugar, but many of my brighter peers work on reducing that intake. Long-form YouTube is also something I find to be a marker of someone who is seeking knowledge. Many of my peers do scroll Twitter and TikTok all day, but I find that those who are easiest to chat with are those who have already scrolled HN today and want to discuss a particular article they know I would have seen. I've had conversations that start with "Did you see that TikTok?" and conversations that start with "Did you see that article on HN?" and the latter is always more engaging.

[dang]

You succeeded in reassuring me further—thanks! This little subthread turned interesting, though it's teeming with sample bias of course.

> Long-form YouTube is also something

Yes, we hear that often too. I didn't mention it above because it's not text, but in terms of how people spend time and where they go to learn things, it's a huge alternative.

I wonder sometimes how HN might interface with the videoverse. I can't imagine having video on the site but I can imagine making videos based on HN threads or articles that have appeared here. I just can't imagine me making them!

[tailscaler2026]

Discord is just chat, I wouldn't call it mind-numbing, reminds me perfectly of IRC from a utility perspective.

That said, it's a commercial closed-source single point of failure.

[Kiro]

How is Discord mind-numbing?

[DaSHacka]

The massive discord servers have a culture that is no different than any other social media

[Ronsenshi]

Perhaps some interest-related Discord servers. Tragically, Discord is just another locked down silo without publicly accessible front on the web.

[daedrdev]

I think its a good fear to have, I feel like many sites dies when the main path of discovering them broke for one reason or another, who knows what the path to discovery of this site is would be for a student today.

[altairprime]

Drop me an email if you like — it’s not really topical to Canvas but I’m happy to discuss further.